Firefox 4, 5, 6 and 7 to be released before the end of 2011

Firefox’s official roadmap has been updated, and boy are there some interesting changes afoot. Most notably, Firefox 7 will ship in 2011. The second biggy, and the main focus of Firefox development in 2011, is to make sure there is no more than 50ms between any user interaction and feedback from the browser.

As far as feature sets go, this is what the roadmap looks like: Firefox 5 will absorb the Account Manager and F1 Simple Sharing add-ons to become built-in features. It looks like Windows 7 64-bit will be officially supported with FF5, too.

Firefox 6 will have a focus on the Web applications framework, JavaScript optimizations, and support for OS X 10.7. For Web applications, some missing pieces of CSS3 and HTML5 will be added to Gecko, the rendering engine.

Firefox 7′s feature list is less clear. Electrolysis (splitting everything into separate processes) and changes to XBL support are mentioned, but nothing certain.

Overall, there’s a big emphasis on responsiveness and “shining the primary UI until it gleams.”

It’ll definitely be interesting to see how Mozilla transitions to a new release cycle — and it’ll definitely mean a lot more Firefox-related news, too!

Update: some conscientious eyes have noticed that the roadmap says ‘Draft’ at the top, so this could all change…